Can't access catalog after Google search

[scottish]

I have recently had reports that people have had difficulties accessing one or our sites after a search on Google. Please follow this sequence:

Go to www.ericauld.com and confirm that you can access the online shop.

Go to Google and do a search for Eric Auld, select the first link – Home Page – and then access the shop.

Go back to Google and select the second link – that is one that Google has indexed (Actinic goes to this page to check whether there are customer accounts and then redirects to the catalog page). Then attempt to access the shop. The screen returns to Google!

The same problem occurs when you use Yahoo! or Alltheweb, and presumably other search engines?

Any thoughts?

[Mike Hughes]

I just tried it and it all works fine for me. Even via the second google link.

Mike

PS. You could try purging sessions on Actinic and doing an update. You might have an old corrupt session on your PC that is somehow causing the problem.

NOTE: This will reset all active shopping carts so you might want to do it at a quiet time for your site.

[scottish]

Thanks for your prompt response Mike. I am away from my office at the moment but have tried to replicate the problem on another PC, but - a bit like taking your car to the garage - everything is fine.

As well as getting reports from users on the Eric Auld site, I did see the same problem occur on an entirely different site/Actinic installation elsewhere last week.

Has anyone else come across this problem?

[scottish]

This problem is still occurring. Does anyone have any experince of this?

Thanks.

[wheesh]

It works fine here. You may have a caching problem on your machine.

Mike
www.wheesh.com

[Mike Hughes]

It still works fine for me but I'm not sure I'm seeing the same thing as you.

When I follow the second search result, I get taken into the shop. i.e. to the acatalog/index.html page. Isn't that happening to you? I have to ask as you say "then attempt to access the shop" but I can't as I'm there already.

Where does the second link take you to?

Mike

[scottish]

Mike(s): thanks for responding.

In answer to olderscot's question, the second link results in the Google screen being re-displayed. The problem has not just been seen on our PCs - I have seen it on a site unrelated to us.

A caching problem does appear to be a key. Someone on another forum has suggested that for some reason Google appears to have caused the page to be cached against itself. They have suggested creating a robots.txt file to exclude Google cgi-bin references, but this doesn't solve the current problem.